Tim Park’ story of discovery and self-discovery in a superbly crafted satisfying novel and his study of the aftermath of an affair – the oldest game in town- between Dan Burrow, the headmaster of a public school in Yorkshire and our narrator and Julia, the mother of two of his pupils. Or better say former affair and former head master, because we join Dan’s story when it’s all over, and he is combing through the wreckage. He’s recreating a walk he and Julia undertook years before, from Konstanz in Germany to Como in Italy. That earlier walk also followed the footsteps of DH Lawrence, as recorded in his book Twilight in Italy. Dan’s own personal twilight journey makes memories erupt. He’s doing it partly for “the pleasure of being in it all again”, and partly because his Alpine walk with Julia was both the peak of their affair and the moment it was punctured by tragedy – and he wants to work out why it happened . Parks switches smoothly between Dan’s present day and his history with Julia, in a clever literary double exposure that never leaves the reader behind. He skewers his narrator’s behaviour, as we learn that he first join3ed the isolated school in Yorkshire to persuade his wife he wasn’t going to stray. After all, even their daughter had noticed him looking at other women. “Which other women, I asked. I was baffled. All of them, she said”.

He recall Julia sought to follow DH Lawrence’s advice to reject the ordinary and “live and be free”, and considered an affair with Dan a controlled risk.

After years of their secret affair, they stepped out together on top of the world, full of delight in one another and in the future they imagined. Or was it only Dan who imagined it, really? He never had the chance to find out, because a few days into their adventure a single phone call changed everything.

Now at the height of  summer, with only a rucksack, a few pages of DH Lawrence that had been Julia’s and his private strata of memory and forgetting, Dan is back on the trial. Step by Step, with a tumult of emotions jostling with the demands of the dramatic Alpine landscape, he reckons with what is life and what it might have been, had he been a different man with different choices.

Dan mentions Lawrence’s collection of poems Look! We Have Come Through! About his and his wife’s sexual reawakening.

Mr Geography by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker £14.99, 224 pages